Republican White House hopefuls are firmly on the campaign trail as the race to win the party's nomination to take on Barack Obama in 2012's US presidential election. The New York Times is also early into the race for app coverage of the campaign, with its NYTimes Election 2012 app.

Released on 7 December for iPhone, it offers news, polling data, candidate information and – when the time comes – live election results.

"Mobile – and more broadly, phone and tablet – is going to be a huge way that people consume news about the election," says Fiona Spruill, editor, emerging platforms at the New York Times.

"We wanted to try to do something innovative and different. It's definitely aimed towards an audience that is extremely interested in political news. We hope people will be checking back multiple times a day."

The app is notable for pulling in news stories from sites beyond the New York Times' own, with the aim of helping people cut through the "overwhelming" amount of coverage that the election will generate in 2012.

"Our own journalism is really the anchor to this app, but we're also adding this element of handpicking the other articles, videos and tweets that we think are the most important if you want to be a well-read political news consumer," says Spruill.

"I wouldn't call it aggregation: it's curation. We have an editor whose full-time job is devoted to the app, and what she's doing is looking at a whole bunch of different feeds to provide this one-stop destination for people."

Spruill explains it's the first time the New York Times has ever appointed a full-time editor for an app. This may be a wider trend: in August 2011 FT.com managing director Rob Grimshaw revealed that the Financial Times had just appointed its first mobile editorial head.

The hand-curation aspect of the New York Times' election app is interesting. Spruill is no luddite, but she says that in this situation people rather than algorithms were the best approach.

"We were trying to create the best possible experience for people on their phone, and it takes people to do that," she says. "What we were trying to provide was not something that could be delivered to an algorithm, even though there are many smart algorithms out there."

Spruill has been working in her emerging platforms role since the beginning of 2011, having moved from a position managing the newspaper's website news team in the days before it was fully integrated with the newspaper's main news team.

"Even in my past role I have always been a big advocate and champion for mobile," she says, having been involved in the New York Times' first mobile WAP site. Her current job has its emphasis on mobile platforms and technology, though.

Spruill works on long-term projects, having been very involved in the elections app, and before that the NYT's iPad fashion app, The Collection, which was launched in November 2011. However, her role also includes thinking about the New York Times website, and what the experience of browsing it is like on mobile devices.

"As someone who's been working on the web since 1999, mobile is so much more complicated – it makes the web sound like it was such a breeze!" she says.

"There are complexities in terms of technology, native versus HTML5, all the different platforms and devices… There are very interesting editorial questions, and how much we should create specific products for specific devices. And of course, there are a lot of really interesting business model questions too."

Talking of which: The New York Times currently offers two digital subscription plans. People can pay $14.99 a month for a NYTimes.com + Smartphone Apps subscription, or $34.99 for All Digital Access, which includes the website, the smartphone apps and the newspaper's iPad app.

The launch of The Collection and NYTimes Election 2012 is interesting because of the way they fit into the company's paywall strategy. In the latter app, non-subscribers can only see the top six news stories, while the former is currently free to all, but in mid-March 2012 will make most of its content subscriber-only too.

In effect, the spin-off apps are providing more value for the digital subscriptions: people don't pay for a single newspaper app, but for that plus a suite of apps around it. "We're experimenting with these vertical apps, but our main news apps are our flagships," says Spruill.

In the meantime, there are new technologies and business opportunities to explore. In response to a question about Flipboard, Zite and other news aggregation apps, Spruill says the NYT has had "really interesting conversations" with these companies, but has nothing specific to announce on the partnership front at this time.

She is also interested in expanding social features in the NYT apps beyond simply being able to share links on social networks, and is wrestling with that HTML5 versus native apps issue. It seems the hybrid approach espoused by British news companies at the recent Apps World conference is also finding favour across the Atlantic.

"The guts of the election app are HTML5, with a native wrapper around it," she says. "It's clear that native apps are something that's very important to us and to our strategy going forward, but the promise of HTML5 is also something that we're constantly exploring."